The entire ordeal was seeped in paradox: A literal All-American, a so-called raceless football legend and the star of ubiquitous television commercials was at the center of a story of violence and villainy that unearthed deeply rooted and fragile racial fault lines between Black and white Americans. The erstwhile hero who, unlike more activist Black athletes of his era, had chosen to avoid tough questions about American racism in exchange for “safe Negro” status, fame and endorsements. That avoidance had plagued him for much of his career and ascension, and separated him from many of his contemporaries like Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Jim Brown in the eyes of many Black Americans. And in one fell swoop, he was now on the run after the brutal double murder of his white ex-wife and her white friend.
A so-called raceless football legend and the star of commercials was at the center of a story of violence that unearthed racial fault lines between Black and white Americans.
We had never seen anything like the 1994 murders of Nicole Brown-Simpson and Ron Goldman that led to O.J. Simpson being tried the next year. Likewise, we had never witnessed anything that resembled the contrasts of jubilation and anger that erupted (almost exclusively along racial lines) when the Los Angeles jury quickly returned “not guilty” verdicts in October 1995. For many Black Americans, there was a confusion born out of irony: How could white people pay such close attention to this trial, but on the issue of racial dynamics, completely miss the bus? Even now, there are many who remain puzzled that O.J. Simpson was acquitted. The answer is as straightforward as it is unpleasant: White supremacy led to O.J.’s acquittal.
To understand this, you have to know the context, which is the justified distrust Black communities had for the Los Angeles Police Department and the larger criminal justice system. It was simultaneously an unprecedented time of gang violence and a high influx of drugs, and a time when police accused of abuse seemed to evade accountability and when even nonpolice who victimized Black people seemed to get off, too.
Take the case in March 1991 when Korean shop owner Soon Ja Du fatally shot Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old Black girl, in the back of the head after she’d wrongly accused her of stealing a bottle of orange juice. A jury convicted the shop owner of voluntary manslaughter, but a Los Angeles judge sentenced Du only to probation. Du killed Harlins within two weeks of Los Angeles police beating Rodney King.
It’s not hyperbole to say that the heat from embers from the 1992 Los Angeles riots, sparked by the acquittal of the four officers who beat King on almost all charges, could still be felt in the air in 1994 and 1995 when members of the Los Angeles Police Department investigated Simpson and testified during his trial. Black Angelenos (and Black people across the nation) believed the LAPD to be the racist enforcement arm of a bigger system that was not only unjust, but went out of its way to target Black people.
And then the prosecution put LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman on the stand.
Fuhrman was the wrecking ball who destroyed the prosecution’s case and helped lead so many Black people outside the courtroom to root against the state.
Through my lens as a former prosecutor and as a civil rights lawyer, it’s easy for me to see that Fuhrman was the wrecking ball who destroyed the prosecution’s case and helped lead so many Black people outside the courtroom to root against the state. The defense playing audio evidence for the jury that Fuhrman had used an anti-Black racial slur (after he’d denied ever having done so), and the public outside the courtroom learning that he’d invoked the Fifth Amendment when asked if he’d ever planted evidence, to many validated (and, in some respects, vindicated) the Angelenos whose warnings about the LAPD had been ignored.
The Fuhrman tape and the portrait the defense painted of Fuhrman was the prompt to root against the system, even if there was a suspicion that O.J. may have done it and we, in turn, were rooting for a cold-blooded killer. As the public discourse grew, Black people sensed that part of what had drawn white America’s ire was a sense of betrayal. Not simply because of a violent act that claimed the lives of two people, but a much deeper betrayal that came from O.J. having been accepted and ordained as “special” or “different” and that, in their minds, these allegations proved to them that they were wrong about him all along. This dynamic resulted in a peculiar impact: White people who once embraced him were acting as if O.J. had committed a crime not only against the two victims but against white people at large; for Black Americans who observed this, that notion combined with some white people acting as if the evidence of racism didn’t matter, made many of the facts matter less.
Though the impetus for the trial was the murder of two innocent people, the racial overtones of the case began to make O.J. a symbol, even among Black people whom he had not previously tried to ingratiate himself with. The more White America unabashedly attempted to demonize O.J., the more he garnered support from Black America. Rightly or wrongly, those Black people saw in O.J. the faceless victims whose stories would never be heard and who had gotten a raw deal from police and the justice system. Many saw him as taking on the system of white supremacy. They were rooting for a “loss” by an oppressive power structure, not so much a “win” for O.J. as an individual.
And, in that way, the paradox became complete. Not only had an All-American, purportedly raceless hero been turned into a Black supervillain, but the very audience he’d turned away from to better appeal to white Americans ended up being the people who chose to protect him when he turned back to them in crisis.
What would have happened if the LAPD hadn’t fomented such distrust in the Black community?
How might things have played out without the heavy hand of white supremacy putting its thumb on the scale? That is, what would have happened if the LAPD hadn’t fomented such distrust in the Black community? What would have happened if the prosecution didn’t have to use the testimony of a person with Fuhrman’s history? What if Fuhrman’s involvement had not raised legitimate concerns as to the handling of the investigation that ultimately planted the seeds of reasonable doubt? What would have happened if his white fans didn’t see O.J. as Black until he was accused of a brutally violent crime? We can never know for sure. But we do know that those expressions of white supremacy are a big reason why Orenthal James Simpson walked free.